June 2014 - Bird-users - Mailing Lists

Modification to BIRD to support better anycast model
by Jay Grizzard 10 Jun '14

10 Jun '14

Hiiiii bird folks. So, I've been looking at setting up a relatively simple anycast config, your typical 'multiple servers broadcast the same route via ospf and network proximity determines which you route to' type setup. BIRD seems like it should be able to do this fairly well, and seems to be one of the better/cleanest designs available for this sort of thing. I do have one issue, though, which seems to be common to all of the software-based routing solutions out there: Ongoing service health isn't really required for continued routing. The typical setup is to do something like monitor the service health with a local tool, and withdraw the route if that tool discovers lack of health. The problem with this is that if something goes wrong with that check -- it hangs, cron dies, or whatever -- the route will keep getting broadcast and traffic will keep getting directed to a system no longer able to handle it. So, I'd like to come up with a basic solution to this, where something active is required to keep anycast routes broadcasting, so if the app, monitoring, cron, etc die, the route will stop getting broadcast, without the monitoring having to 'manually' remove the route. My basic idea right now, in the spirit of "minimum workable footprint," is to do something like having a route filter tied to a file on disk, where the timestamp on that file is used to determine if the route should be exported... if the file ages beyond a certain point, the route gets filtered. So, something like this (syntax totally not thought through yet): filter ospf_out { if (net == 1.2.3.0/24) then { if fileage("/some/path") > 5 then reject; accept; } } ... and then have a health check that checks the app health, and touches /some/path. If the app goes down, or something goes wrong with the monitoring itself (or it just doesn't run at all), that file doesn't get touched, route gets filtered. This seems like the minimum viable interface for making this happen, especially as far as needing to make changes to BIRD is concerned -- it's pretty trivial to read the timestamp on a file on a repeating basis. My questions for the list, then: - Am I correct that BIRD doesn't currently have any functionality of this type available? I've gone through the manual a couple of times and don't see anything obvious, but I could have missed something. - Assuming it can't, where would be the right place to implement this? Is my guess about using an export filter a reasonable one? Anyone with code familiarity care to comment on any gotchas I might run into while doing this? - Anyone know of any non-BIRD tools that can do what I want natively? I looked at the obvious stuff (e.g. quagga) and didn't see anything, but would love to be corrected on this. Thanks! -jay

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preferred route statistics
by Frederik Kriewitz 10 Jun '14

10 Jun '14

Hello, I noticed that the preferred route counter seems to be incremented for each time the route is exported by another protocol. E.g. I've a static protocol with 25 routes which are exported by two other protocols, this results in the following statistics: 25 imported, 0 exported, 50 preferred I'm wondering if that's the intended behavior? So far I expected that preferred means number of routes which are considered "best" in the corresponding routing table (so preferred would be always <= imported). Best Regards, Freddy

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[PATCH] Maximum include depth in Bird config
by Artyom Gavrichenkov 10 Jun '14

10 Jun '14

Hi all, The page at http://bird.network.cz/?get_doc&f=bird-3.html , section 3.2 (as well as doc/bird.sgml), states that "the maximal depth [of inclusion of a new file in a Bird config] is 5". However, effective depth since July, 18, 2012, is 8 (9eceab33:conf/cf-lex.l:82). Maybe the user's guide needs an update, or depth 8 is unsupported? Just in case, patch goes below. Signed-off-by: Artyom Gavrichenkov <ximaera(a)qrator.net> --- doc/bird.sgml | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/doc/bird.sgml b/doc/bird.sgml index fa4c777..beacd4b 100644 --- a/doc/bird.sgml +++ b/doc/bird.sgml @@ -318,7 +318,7 @@ protocol rip { <p><descrip> <tag>include "<m/filename/"</tag> This statement causes inclusion of a new file. <m/Filename/ could also - be a wildcard. The maximal depth is 5. Note that this statement could be + be a wildcard. The maximal depth is 8. Note that this statement could be used anywhere in the config file, not just as a top-level option. <tag><label id="dsc-log">log "<m/filename/"|syslog [name <m/name/]|stderr all|{ <m/list of classes/ }</tag> -- 1.8.1.2

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[PATCH] Add symbol support for various string options
by Frederik Kriewitz 05 Jun '14

05 Jun '14

Hello, during some bird config optimizations (redundancy reductions) we noticed that various string options doesn't accept symbols as value. Attached you find a patch which fixes that. Best Regards, Frederik Kriewitz

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ULG PATCH: BIRD: Fix timeout in case ip/subnet is not in the routing table
by Frederik Kriewitz 04 Jun '14

04 Jun '14

Fixes exceptions like this: ERROR: Exception occured while running a command:Traceback (most recent call last): File "/var/www/html/ulg.py", line 498, in commandThreadBody session.getRouter().runAsyncCommand(session.getCommand(),session.getParameters(),FakeSessionFile(session)) File "/var/www/html/ulgmodel.py", line 463, in runAsyncCommand return self.runRawCommand(c,outfile) File "/var/www/html/ulgbird.py", line 544, in runRawCommand l = sf.readline() File "/usr/lib/python2.7/socket.py", line 447, in readline data = self._sock.recv(self._rbufsize) timeout: timed out

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ULG PATCH: gracefully handle non UTF-8 output of whois
by Frederik Kriewitz 04 Jun '14

04 Jun '14

Fixes exeptions like this (in case whois returns non utf-8 output): ERROR in CGI: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/var/www/html/ulg.py", line 775, in <module> handler.whois(**params) File "/var/www/html/ulg.py", line 738, in whois print self.runULGWhois(key,objtype) File "/var/www/html/ulg.py", line 710, in runULGWhois res = whois.lookup(key) File "/var/www/html/whois.py", line 43, in lookup res=res+l.decode('utf-8') File "/usr/lib/python2.7/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True) UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xf3 in position 24: invalid continuation byte

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ULG PATCH: Fix render() encoding
by Frederik Kriewitz 04 Jun '14

04 Jun '14

Fixes exceptions like this: ERROR in CGI: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/var/www/html/ulg.py", line 785, in <module> handler.index(**params) File "/var/www/html/ulg.py", line 722, in index print self.renderULGIndex() UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 6254: ordinal not in range(128)

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Universal Looking Glass mailinglist
by Frederik Kriewitz 04 Jun '14

04 Jun '14

Hello, is there a dedicated mailinglist for the Universal looking Glass project or what's the best way to submit patches? Best Regards, Freddy

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